ADAdmiralAsshat·Aug 2, 2019
Gutenberg does amazing work. Full stop.
With that said, their specialty is in the transcription part. If you try reading one of their public domain works on a Kindle, they're often full of formatting problems and typos, since the transcripts are sometimes sourced from OCR scans. I've known people who tried starting a free book from Gutenberg, but eventually gave up and bought the same e-book off Amazon for a dollar because it at least had a working TOC. That kind of sale saddens me greatly. The end-user thinks, "Ah, it was only a dollar, I got my money's worth," but the publisher has basically paid nothing for the work, adds a few hours of digital typesetting, and then makes 100% profit on the sale.
Standard Ebooks often uses the Gutenberg raw text as a starting point and then cleans it up. We have a set of tools used for the initial clea
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nup process[0] that handles pagination, TOC generation, and some other basic "modernization" steps. The texts are then proofread and edited to conform to our style guide[1], which aims for maximizing readability on modern e-reader devices, as well as adding semantic meaning to any text markup. You can look at the guide for producing such a book to get a better idea of the process.[2] The end result is a free, public domain work which looks and feels like a professional production.
[0] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools
[1] https://standardebooks.org/contribute/typography
[2] https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...